25 iPads used to make one big interactive touch display

This is awesome -- a group of musical composers and artists connected up 25 iPads in an installation commissioned by the Environmental Ministry of Japan to create a huge display 25 touchscreens big. Not only do the iPads stream one big image, but they're also interactive -- you can speed the image up or down by swiping, or even change each iPad's individual view. Each iPad also starts out playing one tune, all of them together in harmony, but as visitors come along and change the views and the speed and tone of the music, you eventually get 25 different sounds being played with 25 different views, a metaphor for how each of us affects our own little part of the world as we move through life. The challenge, then, is to get the iPads back together, all in sync, and rebuild the world that we each claimed a little part of.

You can watch video of how the installation works after the break, and there's also a hands-on video with a little more technical background on the project. It's very cool -- a project like this would be much more expensive (and probably a lot harder to do) without Apple's own magical and revolutionary device. The iPad keeps surprising us with all of the various ways it can be used to create and display interactive art.